Locked, loaded and ready to leak

Afew weeks ago,
Hillary Clinton
went on a global “apology tour" over the WikiLeaks jive. You have to wonder what she has to apologise for, considering she had nothing to do with the whole thing, but in case you hadn’t noticed, apologies seem to be all the rage these days. If you’ve got a little time on your hands, walk up to a total stranger and say you’re sorry for being so sorry.

“I think I will be answering concerns about WikiLeaks for the rest of my life," she said, “not just the rest of my tenure as Secretary of State." Actually, I think many of us have a lot more we’d like to know about her, Bill and Monica Lewinsky but we’ve all become too sophisticated to bring that up again. Still . . .

WikiLeaks is juicy stuff except it’s hard to remember it all, much less spend the rest of your life apologising for it. There seems to be a WikiLeak for every occasion, except the ones already covered by Hallmark. If you’ve got a good secret, look for it to turn up in The Guardian or The Washington Post. If it doesn’t, the quality of your secret is a little on the wimp side.

One of Clinton’s aims was to settle things down in the Middle East, which people have been trying to do for a few thousand years with little success. Events of the past few weeks in Tunisia and Egypt demonstrate this, not to mention the CIA’s continuing inability to get the weather right. (I suspect the agency still has a staff office trying to figure out what went wrong with the Bay of Pigs).

Anyway, what happened was the leaks showed some of Iran’s Arab neighbours got bent out of shape when some cables revealed they were already bent out of shape about Iran’s nuclear capacity.

Arabs in the Middle East like to portray themselves as one big happy family, when in reality half of them hate the other half’s guts, as the leaks showed. Hillary’s mission was to tell them to get back to basic policy – “We’re America. Remember? Hate us instead."

If he gets extradited to Sweden and subsequently convicted, yes, we’ll all agree he was a bad person in his private life. He could then join a club that includes numerous previously and currently elected world leaders, not to mention a bunch of us, too.

Related Quotes

Company Profile

WikiLeaks merely brings out into the open what a lot of people already suspected, such as nobody in his right mind wants Iran to go nuke.

American foreign policy behind the scenes is about as treacherous as a M*A*S*H rerun.

Heck, Chicago politics makes the State Department look like a pillow fight.

There seems to be no end to what Assange et al have gathered nor the efforts of various governments, including Australia’s, to find something . . . anything . . . to find somebody . . . anybody . . . guilty. Meanwhile, the rest of us enjoy getting in touch with the inner snoop in ourselves and watching the world’s wise guys squirm a little.

A lot of this information shouldn’t have been classified in the first place, but governments love to keep secrets.

You find that out each year as some statute of limitations runs out on something that happened in World War II or a tidbit about the Kennedys. What governments hate is being embarrassed in, as the current pop saying goes, real time. But that’s what a lot of this is all about – embarrassment.

It turns out that in the world’s embassies and consulates, the people tend to be just as gossipy, petty and vindictive as the rest of us are every day.

It kind of restores your faith in human nature, when you think about it.

Most of us are probably looking forward to some further release from WikiLeaks, although you start to wonder what’s still left.

It seems to have plumbed the depths of available information, although I’m still wondering about the Building the Education Revolution and the Warren Commission report.

Also, keep an eye on Sweden because by now, Assange probably has the entire country wired and ready to boogie.